Journal Entry 1

Copyright:

In this blog entry I plan on talking about copyright and whether or not the law should disregard copyright all together and allow people to ‘copyright’ the original piece of work freely. Also, I will look at some of the effects it has, particularly on the music industry. First of all, I will give what I understand to be the definition of copyright. A piece of work that needs to gain the rights from the ‘author’ to use, publish or sell the piece of work.
The amount of people who download illegally has increased dramatically over the last five years. The interest in music is at its all time highest. One reason may be because of the availability that the potential audience have in comparison to years gone by. I feel that this is true in my opinion about the availability and a possible cause to illegal downloads. In my opinion the law on copyright does need changing. It should adapt to recent times but there should still be a copyright law in place today. This is to protect the publisher or creator’s piece of work to some degree, because if there was no copyright law then anybody could claim that a particular piece of work was theirs and this would lead to lots of court cases.
On the other hand, there are arguments that the copyright law that is in place causes problems to participatory culture. For example, one argument says that copyrighting is perfectly acceptable as long as the ‘copyrighter’ is not doing so to gain financially and ensuring that they give credit to the publisher in their work, so not claiming that it is their piece of work (Lessig, L, 2004: 1). To sum up Lessig’s opinions on participatory culture the law on copyright means that people who have never illegally download and do not profit from it are being penalised in that they cannot remix a combination of songs. This eliminates creativity within the music industry, especially for DJ’s and hip-hop artists.
Another form of copyright is the video recorder or DVD recorder. These types of technology allow for programmes and films shown on the television (TV) to be recorded and seen again and again at the person’s discretion. Hollywood and other multi-million companies were not very pleased at companies like Sony in the beginning of their introduction to society. This was because they charged people to watch the film through the sale of videos or on TV where it was a pay per view type of entertainment format. Sony got to money driven though and made their customers ‘jump ship’; they made the engineering more expensive to allow the audience do less with their music. However, the audience did want to do a lot with the music they had wanted to download or to listen to. They missed a trick in that that was one of the features the audience liked to do with the music.

Bibliography:
• Lessig, L. (2004) Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity New York: Penguin Books. (WWW) available from: http://www.free-culture.cc.freecontent